This demolinguistic portrait of the French-speaking population in Nova Scotia was undertaken with the financial support of Canadian Heritage's Official Languages Secretariat, Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC) and the Department of Justice Canada. It is the ninth of a series of portraits of official-language minorities in Canada, prepared by Statistics Canada's Language Statistics Section.

This portrait of the French-speaking population in Nova Scotia contains information drawn from Canadian censuses from 1951 to 2006 and the Survey on the Vitality of Official-Language Minorities (SVOLM) conducted in 2006 by Statistics Canada. Census: The census data contained in this report are drawn from the long census questionnaire, completed by 20% of households and including 61 questions of which 7 are language-related. Survey on the Vitality of Official-Language Minorities (SVOLM): This is a cross-sectional sample survey. Respondents to the (SVOLM) are selected from the sample of persons who completed the long questionnaire in the 2006 Census.